The Case Students Weren't Supposed to Like: World ID

This past semester, Professor Ghosh and I taught a series of blockchain and crypto cases at Harvard Business School. For our final class this spring, we picked the one I thought would get torn apart: World.

On paper it’s easy to hate. A company asks you to scan your iris with a metal orb, pays you in a token, and is co-founded by Sam Altman — the same person building the AI that makes proving your humanity necessary in the first place. I walked in expecting ninety MBA students to spend eighty minutes explaining why this was dystopian.

Then we voted. 52 out of 90 said they’d invest.

For context, that’s one of the highest conviction votes we’ve seen all semester. When we taught Circle — the company behind USDC, a business with real revenue and a public listing — only 26% said they’d put money in. Worldcoin more than doubled that.

What surprised me wasn’t the number. It was the reasoning.

Almost nobody defended the tokenomics. One student, a former crypto trader put it bluntly “this is just a subsidy for the founders to build without giving you any guarantees.” Much of the room doubted the token would capture the value the network creates.

They voted to invest anyway, because nearly everyone agreed on one thing: proving you’re human online is about to become one of the internet’s most valuable problems. Bots already generate >50% of web traffic, and AI agents are getting good enough that CAPTCHAs and blue checkmarks won’t cut it. Even the students who thought Worldcoin would lose thought someone wins the proof-of-personhood market — and Worldcoin has a multi-year head start with 18mm verified humans.

That’s a different bet than “this token goes up.” It’s a bet that the problem is real, the incumbent solution doesn’t exist, and the token is an integral part of the system.

I had prepped for a privacy debate. It barely happened.

The question that actually split the room: who should control a global identity layer used by billions of people? Plenty of students were uneasy handing that to any single company, let alone one tied to Sam Altman.

But when I pushed them for a better steward, the room fell apart. Governments? Nonprofits? A decentralized protocol? An international consortium? Every alternative drew as many objections as Worldcoin itself. By the end, the debate wasn’t whether World ID was good. It was whether anyone could realistically build something better.

The sharpest divide in the room wasn’t political — it was geographic.

Students from countries with strong institutions were comfortable with government-issued digital identity. Students from parts of Latin America and elsewhere with weaker institutional trust heard “government-run identity layer” and reacted like it was a threat, not a safeguard.

Same proposal, opposite reactions, depending entirely on the institutions people had lived under. Technologies like World ID won’t be judged in a vacuum; they’ll be judged against whatever alternative each person has actually experienced.

I walked into class expecting to teach students about World ID. Instead, the discussion taught me something about technological adoption.

People don’t adopt new technologies because they think they’re perfect. They adopt them when the existing alternative feels worse. Whether World ID ultimately succeeds remains an open question. Same with whether the token is inherently valuable

But after watching ninety smart skeptics debate it for eighty minutes, I’m much more convinced that the problem it is trying to solve is real—and much less certain that there is an obvious alternative.

The full case we wrote is posted here.